eConozco

» see econozco.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

econozco was a spanish product. spanish was not one of my languages, and the spanish job market was not one i was ever going to enter from ankara. anyway, what i can say about it is what wikipedia and one archived techcrunch post from 2010 will say for me.

grupo galenicom launched econozco around 2003 out of spain, aiming at the professional-networking category before linkedin had a serious localized presence in the country. the pitch was familiar in shape: an identity page carrying work history, wired to a request-introduction path for people who wanted to reach someone one degree of separation away. it built slowly for four years against a small competitive field, most of which was english-first and not particularly tuned to how spanish white-collar work actually moved.

by august 2006 econozco had crossed 100,000 members. by early 2007 the number was around 150,000. that is when xing (the german professional network then called openbc) came shopping and bought the parent group in march 2007. the standalone econozco product stayed live a few more months before xing migrated the accounts into its own spanish tier in october 2007. the domain got redirected on the same handover.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it actually ended ~

this was not a shutdown driven by failure. econozco had a working product with paying users in a market where linkedin was still ramping up its localization work. what xing bought in march 2007 was a spanish beachhead: a member base already converted plus a domain the acquirer could redirect the moment the deal closed. brand consolidation was the point of the transaction, not a fallback from it.

xing itself later lost the wider european professional-network war to linkedin. by the mid-2010s xing was retreating into a german-speaking dach niche while linkedin took spain outright, past one million users in the country by july 2010 and past twenty million a decade later. so the spanish professionals econozco had originally signed up mostly ended up on linkedin anyway, one migration removed.

~ what got buried ~

there is very little archive of econozco. no english press covered it before the acquisition, and the spanish tech press of 2003 through 2006 has mostly rotted off the crawlable web. what survives is a wikipedia stub with two dates on it. that is the fate of a lot of pre-linkedin non-english professional networks: bought during the consolidation window of 2007 through 2010, folded quietly, remembered later only when someone puts together a comparison table of national linkedin analogues.

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